Did you know that the way you lie changes depending on your cultural background?

ET CONTRIBUTORS|

Updated: Jun 18, 2017, 11.13 AM IST

0Comments

Lying is more common than we assume.

By Debkumar Mitra

What was the ethnic origin of Pinocchio, the boy whose nose grew every time he lied? If that was known, then we could have nailed the lie by simply hearing the boy — from Carlo Collodi’s famous children’s story — speak. A group of psychologists at Lancaster University, UK, has discovered that “people’s language changes when they lie depending on their cultural background”. That imples, even when they are using the same language, an Indian’s lie will be different from that of a Hungarian.

Lying is more common than we assume. Science has found people who claim the moral high ground on the issue also lie. A study based on an internet survey of 1,000 American adults conducted in 2010 concluded that people lie, on average, once or twice a day.

In 2002, a University of Massachusetts researcher found that as high as 60% of the people surveyed “lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation”.

Most of these lies can be categorised as white lies, those “alternative truths” that people often concoct for social acceptance — such as changing the place of birth, salary received or price of dresses. Then there are exaggerations, usually of little harm but can sometime be used to nullify opposition. Finally, there are those lies that have serious consequences if found out. The Lancaster study covers all types of lies.

Are all lies acceptable as a social communication? In a 2009 study on the acceptability of lying, a group of Chinese and American students were asked to rate the degree to which they perceived lying as acceptable or unacceptable.

The results indicated that lies told for malicious or self-benefiting purposes were less acceptable than mutually benefiting lies and lies that benefit others. The researchers also noted that “culture and the type of relationship between liars and targets of lies interacted with motive for lying to affect the perceived acceptability of deception”.

A research paper on the Lancaster study titled, “Culture moderates changes in linguistic self-presentation and detail provision when deceiving others”, is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

According to Paul Taylor of Lancaster University and an author of the research paper, science has long known that liars change their language. Their research shows that longstanding beliefs about those changes in a liar’s language are not true for all cultures.

Lie Detector To test their hypothesis on culture specific lying, the UK researchers asked 320 participants of White European, Black African, South Asian and White British ethnicity to complete a “Catch the Liar” task in which “they provided genuine and fabricated statements about either their past experiences or an opinion and counter-opinion”. The participants were from 17 different countries living in the UK.

Black African ethnicity reported being from Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, State of Eritrea, the Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe; those indicating South Asian ethnicity reported being from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan; those indicating White European ethnicity reported being from Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia; and those indicating White British ethnicity reported being from England, the researchers write in the paper.

In the past, it has been observed that with some exceptions, the change in language use when lying is marked by a decrease of “I” or the first-person pronoun use, which is mostly compensated by an increased third-person pronoun use. The Lancaster researchers found the trend in the statements of Western liars rather than in the statements of truth-tellers of the same ethnicity. A liar’s change in behaviour is widely believed to reflect the liar’s efforts to “dissociate self from the lie and eschew personal responsibility for the event”.

To their surprise, the researchers did not find any decrease in the use of “I” while examining the lies of South Asian and Black African participants. Instead, these participants increased their use of first-person pronoun and decreased the third person — he or she — pronouns. It appeared that liars from these two ethnicities sought to distance their social group rather than themselves from the lie.

The study also noted differences in the kind of contextual details the liars reported. The White European and White British participants followed the well-researched trend of decreasing the perceptual information and substituting with an increase in the social details they provided in their lie. In contrast, the South Asian and Black African participants increased the perceptual information they gave when lying, to compensate for providing less social details.

The researchers also found an interesting trend that relates to the moderating effect of lie type. “We found that pronoun use and contextual embedding varied when participants lied about experiences but not when they lied about opinions,” they write in the paper. “The results demonstrate that linguistic cues to deception do not appear consistently across all cultures. The differences are dictated by known cultural differences in cognition and social norms.”

The Lancaster study has implications for forensic risk assessments, discrimination proceedings and the evaluation of asylum seekers. With societies becoming largely multi-cultural, the study is likely to aid law enforcing agencies.

Despite covering different types of lies, the Lancaster study does not provide any answer to the language aspects of a new type of communication tool — alternative facts. After its rediscovery by the Trump administration, it has become a popular method of communication on social media platforms.

Do alternative facts have culture-specific markers for identification? Till science finds an answer, keep watching the best known alternative fact provider’s nose or better still look for a change in the bright orange colour of his hair.

*Mitra is a Kolkata-based science writer

0Comments

Want stories like this in your inbox? Sign up for the daily ET Panache newsletter.